Hell on Church Street (2 page)

“What do you mean?”

“What if we make a deal, changing this from a robbery gone bad into a business proposition?”

I flicked ashes on his backseat. “I’m listening.”

“What you need to understand is that I’m not above giving you money. I can give you three thousand dollars right now. But I want something in return.”

Neither of us had opened a window to let the smoke out, and the car was like a rolling gas chamber.

“And what do I have to do for this money?” I asked.

I turned around for some reason to see if we were being followed. Everything was fucked up. We weren’t being followed, but I was starting to get worried.

“Where are we going?” I said.

“Driving,” he said. “Just driving.”

I stared at the back of his head and thought about it. Something was wrong with him, but, on the other hand, I really didn’t have a dime in my pockets. I couldn’t make him stop the car without wrecking it, and if he did wreck it I might be fucked up and hurt out in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t really do much except wait and see what happened. At least we were moving away from Oklahoma.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Geoffrey Webb,” he answered. “What’s yours?”

“What do I have to do for this money, Geoffrey?”

“Nothing. Just ride along with me for a while,” he said.
 
He checked his speed. “Yes. I’d say just three or four hours at the outside.”

“Just ride around with you?”

“Just sit back there. I haven’t talked to anyone in a very long time.”

I stared at him. “And?”

He shrugged his big shoulders and took a short drag off his cigarette.

“What are you not telling me?”

“Look,” he said, “I—what’s your name?”

“Right,” I said. “I’m going to tell you my name.”

“I find it hard to talk to someone if I don’t know his name.”

“I guess you’ll have to find it hard,” I said.

He smiled in the rearview mirror.

“Okay,” he said.

“You sick or something?”

He shrugged. “Not physically.”

“This sounds a lot like bullshit to me, Geoffrey,” I said. “This sounds like you’re taking me into some damn trap or something.”

He nodded, cracked his window and flipped his butt out. “That’s not the case, but I guess I can understand your paranoia. You’re a bad man; I get it. You don’t know me from Adam, and here I am offering you money to ride with me for a while. You think about it for a minute, though, I’m sure you’ll see how absurd the idea of a ‘trap’ is.”

“Where are you going?”
 

He pulled a greasy napkin from a wadded-up fast food sack and dabbed blood from his ear. “Arkansas.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Ever been there?” he asked.

“Couple of times.”

“What’d you think?”

“Nothing
there
but weather and sweat.”

He smiled. “Well, I’m sure you can make do,” he said. He dug out his wallet and tossed it over his shoulder. “It’s a simple proposition,” he said. “The three thousand is in there.”

I opened the wallet. It was fat with hundred-dollar bills. I didn’t count it, but it looked to be about right. I looked back up at him. My hands were sweaty for some reason. I knew I could beat the shit out of Geoffrey Webb. I’d already smacked the hell out of him, but he had taken it like it was more inconvenient than anything else. He wasn’t afraid of me and he wasn’t afraid of the gun, either.

“Okay,” I said. I slipped the gun in my coat pocket. “Just drive and shut up for a minute. You make me jumpy blathering on.”

He didn’t reply to that at all, and we rode for a while in silence. Oklahoma rolled past like a flat black nothing.
 

I watched him in the rearview mirror. He glanced at me and then
back
at the road.

“What’s your deal?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

He smiled. “You wanted me to stay quiet, I thought.”

“I changed my mind.”

“Good,” he said. “I haven’t had a real conversation in years.”

“Hard to believe, talky fucker like you.”

“I’ve always been a good talker. Talked my way out of a lot of trouble. A lot of trouble.”

I could believe it. I’d known plenty of con men, guys who could talk the stink off of shit. And Webb talked like a con man who’d been out
of
 
business
for a long time but still had some juice inside him.

 
“Then what’s the problem?” I said.

“There’s a level of trouble you can’t talk your way out of,” he said. “Some trouble is like a cancer. It just grows inside you. Nothing stops it. It just keeps growing and growing, eating everything it touches.”

“Then what?”

“You die.” He took a deep breath and lit up another cigarette. “But I’ve been living like I was dead for years now. I’ve been a walking shadow, like Shakespeare wrote about.”

“Shakespeare.”

He looked at me in the rearview mirror.

 
“Yeah, I’ve read a few books,” he said. “I used to read a lot. I used to do a lot of things.”

“So what happened?”

“The story of my life?”

“Whatever.”

He shrugged. “The story of my life is I lived, I fucked up, and I’m going to die. I’ll probably go to hell.”

I stubbed out my butt on his car seat. He didn’t seem to notice. He was too busy listening to himself talk.

“That’s cheery, I know,” he said, “but it’s the truth. I’ve been living like a termite for years now: smoking, eating shit,
working
the nightshift at a supermarket. No kind of life. No friends. No family. The only emotion I ever feel anymore, when I feel anything at all, is fear.”

“Fear of what? You obviously
ain’t
afraid to die.”

“No. But you can get to a point where you’re more afraid of living than dying.”

He sat there silent for
awhile
. I didn’t have anything to say to that. Life sucked, sure, but what else was there? Nothing?

“Living like a termite is my punishment,” he said.

“For what?”

“Sins.”

“Which ones?”

“You want to know?”

“
Ain’t
got anything else to do until we hit Arkansas.”

“I’ll tell you,” he said. “I’ve never told anyone, but I’ll tell you. You look at me and you see a fat slob, a sucker,
a
potential victim. Right?”

I just stared at him.

“Fine,” he said, “I’m not an intimidating man. Believe me, I know. But I’m not talking about being intimidating. I used to be the safest man you could imagine. At one time, years ago, so many people loved me and trusted me you wouldn’t believe it. I’ve known the kind of trust that few people are ever afforded. And I betrayed it. So now I guess I deserve the termite life I’ve been living. I deserve to die the way I’m going to die. I betrayed everyone who ever trusted me, and God saw fit to cast me down with the termites. No amount of forgiveness or understanding will change what I’ve done.”

He glanced back at me.

I told him, “Pass me those cigarettes.”

As he passed a pack back to me, he smiled the oddest smile. “I’ll tell you why I’m going to hell,” he said. “You’ll soon agree I deserve it.”

Part Two:

Hell on Church Street

Chapter Two

To begin at the beginning: I had an abusive father—I know, my kind always does, but we’re a regenerating lot of bastards. Sin begets sin. My father was a mean drunk, as was his father before him, and on and on, back, probably, to Lot, that original disgusting drunk in the Bible who, while on the booze, banged his two daughters. Not just one daughter, mind you, but both, and apparently at the same time. If drunken group sex with your own daughters doesn’t qualify you for the termite colony, nothing will.

Anyway, my father was a sadistic fuck who worked as a RN at a little hospital on the outskirts of Little Rock. He was smart, you see, but he was sick. He would sit on our back porch after work drinking beer and shooting at the trees with his .22.

Once, when I was about eleven, he told me to go pick up a branch he’d blasted off a pine tree with repeated shooting, and as I walked out to the branch, he lifted the gun to his shoulder. I looked back and saw him and he was smiling, a thin twisted little smile that made him look like the Joker. I started to shake. “Pick up that branch,” he called without moving the gun. The sight on the barrel obscured his eye, and I began to cry. “Pick up that fucking branch,” he yelled. “You pick up that branch right now, you pussy.” I crumbled to the ground, and he fired the gun. I wet myself and realized then that he’d fired the gun in the air. He didn’t say anything more about the branch.

So you see, it’s
all my father’s
fault.

As for my mother, what can I say about her except that she was the type of woman who would marry my
father.
They divorced when I was thirteen. I stayed with her, of course, which thrilled her not one little bit, but she did enjoy suing him for child support. He kept threatening to kill her, which I think secretly turned her on, and he was sent to jail for a time. Not long after he went away, Mom left me with her mother-in-law and ran off. The last time I tried to track her down, I found that she’d been working as a prostitute around truck stops in Texarkana.

It was my uncle Ronald—my mother’s little brother and a surprisingly sane human being—who first took me to church when I was fifteen. He was dull and balding, with a fat wife and a crappy job at Maytag, but he was a nice man who thought church might do me some good.